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By the time Charles Manson was convicted in 1971, the 1960s were already dead.

Not in the literal sense, of course.

A calendar had already flipped over into a new decade,

but the spirit of the area, the idealism,

the radical optimism that had to find it,

had been buried under the weight of its own contradictions.

And the Manson murders, they were the nail in the coffin. Before August 1969, the counterculture was still in full swing. The anti-war

movement had grown too big to ignore. Civil rights activists, Black Panthers, student radicals, everywhere you looked,

people were challenging the status quo. The establishment that people in power had a real problem,

on their hands. Then, in the span of two nights, everything changed. Suddenly, hippies weren't just

harmless kids tripping on acid and playing guitars in the park.

They were dangerous, unstable, capable of unthinkable violence.

Charles Manson became the face of the counterculture's collapse, a wild-eyed, long-haired lunatic

who symbolized everything the government wanted Middle America to fear. But here's the thing.

Manson was never a leader of the counterculture. He wasn't some anti-war activists. He wasn't politically

engaged. He wasn't even particularly respected in the hippie scene. And yet almost overnight,

the media turned him into the movement's worst nightmare.

...